confused of calcutta

For the first twenty-three years of my life, I’d never known a home other than Calcutta. I’d visited other cities, sure, but never actually lived anywhere else. And I’d never left the country.
So when I came to the UK nearly twenty-seven years ago, I came unprepared for many things; there were many situations and environments [...]

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Over dinner at Rasoi a few nights ago, the conversation meandered all over the place, and at one point touched upon the kind of music people listened to. Someone was trying to describe Rick Wakeman’s Six Wives to someone else, and one thing led to another and I found myself extolling the virtues of Steve [...]

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It’s been a very long time since I wrote any code at all. [And a good thing too, I hear you say :-) ]. As I get older, I find myself seeking (and occasionally finding) vicarious proxies for many things; one of the commonest proxies I use is reading.
So. While wandering around, I found this [...]

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London calling to the underworld
Come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls
The Clash, London Calling
I’d heard about an unusual little burst of activity on Wikipedia over the last few days: people were frenetically editing and improving an article listing songs that were about London or parts of London.
You can find the article in [...]

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When I was a mere stripling I used to enjoy playing text-based adventure games; as I grew older, I watched them morph into graphic representations,  as games like Larry The Lounge Lizard came out.
But I never really made the cut into the later rounds of MMOG and virtual worlds. I did venture into Second Life, [...]

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In a week when the New York Times announced that it was making its digital archives available to all free of charge, I found myself spending time thinking about open access publishing in general, spurred on by this article in the New Scientist.
Initially I could not get over the irony of finding that an article [...]

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My post yesterday elicited a few comments, and they took my thoughts down a different track. Today we have a lot of pushback against advertising. So why would someone predisposed to avoid ads watch something despite knowing it was an ad? Take a look at this video, with a whole pile of red flags around [...]

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I’ve always imagined advertising to be about a transfer of information, connecting the customer to the product or service. And there’ve been different ways of doing it, some good, some not so good.
In the first age of advertising, recommendations flowed from the product marketers to the customers. Try this. Buy this. Nine out of ten [...]

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I quote from the Economist’s leader on recent events in the UK banking sector:
….This debacle holds lessons for the way Britain regulates its banks. As Mr King pointed out, defending his performance in front of a House of Commons committee on September 20th, the law prevents the Bank either from staging a covert rescue operation [...]

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Some of you may have been surprised to see the Byte Night “advertisement” appear in my sidebar. I haven’t suddenly changed my mind and started allowing ads to be placed on the blog, nothing like that.
It’s something far simpler. Along with four of my colleagues, I’m spending the night “sleeping rough” on the 5th of [...]

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